Split Decision
Denby Delighted: “Michael Mann’s Public Enemies is a ravishing dream of violent gangster life in the thirties — not a tough, funny, and, finally, tragic dream like Bonnie and Clyde but a flowing, velvety fantasia of the crime wave that mesmerized the nation early in the decade.
“The scowling men in long dark coats and hats, led by the fashion-plate bandit John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), march into a grand Midwestern bank with marble floors and brass railings, take over the place, throw the cash in bags, and make their getaway, jumping onto the sideboards of flat-topped black Fords — beautiful cars with curved grilles and rounded headlights that stand straight up from the cars’ bodies.
“It’s the American poetry of crime. Throughout the movie, blazing tommy guns emit little spearheads of flame, just as in a comic book. Men get their skulls bashed with gun butts, and get thrown out of cars, but, despite all the violence, the movie is aesthetically shaped and slightly distanced by the pictorial verve of gangland effrontery — the public aggression that Mann makes inseparable from high style. He keeps the camera moving, and the editing (by Paul Rubell and Jeffrey Ford) reinforces the speed without jamming ragged fragments together in the manner of hack filmmaking. As a piece of direction, Public Enemies is often breathtakingly fast, but it’s always lucid.”
Denby Troubled: “[The film] needed a charge of surprise, and I wish the filmmakers had more forcefully developed two ironies embedded in the material. For all of Hoover and Purvis’s talk of ‘scientific methods,’ the new F.B.I. wins the war not by arresting criminals and sending them to prison but by massacring them.
“And Dillinger, as the movie readily shows, is deluded about himself. He embraces the future, but, actually, his time is over; the new crime syndicates dismiss him as a troublemaking fool. And although the screenplay keeps insisting that he’s intelligent and shrewd, the movie demonstrates the opposite. The character doesn’t quite add up. If he had been given a wild destructive streak, the conception might have made more sense, but Mann seems to trip over his own story by making Dillinger so self-contained and cool. The problem with casting a star as low-key and attractive as Johnny Depp is that you can’t turn him into a man who is, at bottom, a loser.”
this is a negative review on rottentomatoes — not sure why. It’s obvious Denby admires the film to a certain degree but can’t commit himself to it completely.
Rotten Tomatoes is not accurate at all. Any slightly mixed review like this is given a rotten rating, so the eventual overall score is always distorted. It’s about as reliable as the IMDB ratings.
“Emotionally Neutered.”
That was his problem with Miami Vice, in my opinion, as you couldn’t really get invested in any one character, their goals and conflicts…..and Mann seemed content to hold the audience at arms length, operating with complete detachment.
Ali had the same problem.
Denby hits upon one of the things that is wrong with this movie. Nothing remotely surprising happens. If you take The Untouchables, for instance, there are dozens of unexpected moments, the girl and the bomb, de niro and the baseballl bat etc. The audience is always a step ahead of Public Enemies. Oh and it shamelessly glorifies a scumbag and takes liberties with burrough’s source material.
Jeff, it this was directed by Every Man rather than Michael Mann, you wouldn’t be praising it to the skies.
From experience I know that it’s very easy to contact Rotten Tomatoes and convince them to flip a negative to a positive if the language of the review warrants it.
As a critic whose reviews appear on Rotten Tomatoes, I can tell you that it’s up to the reviewer to set his or her own “fresh” or “rotten” score when inputting the relevant info (pull quote, link to full review, etc.). However, in the case of someone like Denby, it might, for all we know, actually be some New Yorker intern who does that scutwork for him. Denby doesn’t seem terribly web-savvy.
I enjoy the exposure RT brings my reviews (and the reviews of the other critics on my website), but am uncomfortable with the stark “fresh” or “rotten” choice. What if a movie is fresh in some regards and rotten in others? Our website grades on a star basis, 1 to 5, so if I give a film three stars and up, it gets a “fresh”; 2 and below, a “rotten.”
Italics are the new black
Now you’re resorting to negative reviews to help you prove this movie is a masterpiece?
Time magazine just RIPPED “Public Enemies” today. OUCH!!!
Actually the time review wasn’t so bad, but I read worse ones on rotten tomatoes.
Here’s a link to the TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL review: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/public-enemies/article1202376/
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